Gaspee

The raid on the HMS Gaspee on the night of June 9, 1772 and its tenuous but clever cover-up perpetrated in court became an epic expression of the emerging American spirit that later burst into the long and bloody revolution. In Rhode Island just prior to the American Revolution, growing patriot-loyalist conflict culminated with the nighttime seizure and burning of the HMS Gaspee and led to the first exchange of fire of the Revolution, three years before the Minutemen of Lexington Green and Concord Bridge. The shots exchanged, the clash of arms, the seizing of the ship and crew were such an insult to the King, and to the Royal Navy, that the Crown's magistrates threatened military occupation long before the fever of revolution swept the countryside from farm to village to town. Based on actual events and records.